Sample Text:
a woman who has never been around babies, helping to care to infants, can turn to formal classes in childcare and read countless books, but that woman will not become
an expert at taking care of a baby until she actually has a baby and takes on the primary care of an infant. Many of the skills involved, from soothing
a crying baby to bathing and in countless other ways, are impossible to learn secondhand. As this indicates, in many ways, knowledge gained from personal experience is, in many ways,
superior to knowledge gained from formal classroom instruction. As the above example demonstrates, knowledge gained from personal experience includes developing skills that are difficult to obtain from simply reading
or being lectured on a specific subject. Another aspect of learning that occurs due to personal experience is that it can often offer insights that are not explicit in formal
sources of learning. For example, a young Turkish woman explains how personal experience influenced her wearing of the Islamic headscarf, as she says that she has heard people tell bus
drivers to "run over these women in the street with the headscarf" (Kadioglu 22). It was after this experience, which made her sympathetic towards these women, that she began reading
the Quran. For this young woman, the headscarf is not only a sign of her faith, but a political protest that stems from the lesson taught her by personal experience.
It is difficult to "over-emphasize how politically sensitive religious education is in Turkish society" or the impact that personal experience has on peoples positions (Shively 683). Educator Richard W.
Livingstone has persuasively argued in this writing that that there is a direct "relationship between learning and life experience" and, because of this factor, the "cultural education of the young"